Breath leaves Ify’s lungs. “Sh-she?” Ify manages to say at last. But Ify knows there’s only one person Ngozi could be talking about. Onyii.
Ngozi shakes her head. “Never told us a single thing. To be honest, I don’t know what she’d make of you now.” She gestures with her hand to indicate the entirety of Ify, not just her outfit, Ify feels, but her carriage, her voice, the way she takes up space. The fact that she is a Colonial official. “It’s clear that you are just as smart as others have said.”
“Why did you bring me here?” Her patience is running thin. She welcomes the new hardness in her voice.
“Like I told you in the hospital, they were going to erase your memory.”
“Who’s ‘they’? And why would they perform an invasive operation on a Colonial official without consent?”
Ngozi snorts. “Is that how they talk up there?” She raises a finger lazily, pointing at a place worlds away. And Ify realizes in that moment just how far she is from home. She wants to tell this woman to answer the question, but the memory of her minders dying is still fresh and she can’t bring herself to issue commands. So instead, she lets the emotion play on her face. Please, she asks with her eyes. So Ngozi says, “They deemed you a contagion risk. I’m sure they were tracking your movements as soon as you arrived in Nigeria. We found you only because they were looking. And they would have gotten to you had we not lucked into your location at that police station.”
“You were there?”
Ngozi nods. Then she asks, “What are you doing here?”
Ify considers lying, but at this point she doesn’t know what she should hold back, so she sighs. “I’m a medical professional in Alabast Central. I oversee the refugee ward. Recently, the children under my care have become ill. Each of them has fallen into a coma. Identical symptoms. We tried to figure out what was wrong, but we found no answers.”
“And why does that bring you here?”
“The majority of those who took ill were Nigerian. My superiors thought it appropriate that I be sent to investigate.”
Ngozi lets out another derisive snort. “Like we are bringing them plague.”
No, not like that, Ify wants to tell her, but she knows Ngozi’s not entirely wrong in thinking that this was the reasoning of her supervisors. “I just want to find out what’s happening to them.”
“It makes sense why the government is after you, then. You are breaking the law. Or you will be very soon.”
“Why? What are you talking about?”
“It is against the law to speak openly about the war. It is against the law to document it, to write about it, to reference it, even to think about it.” She pauses to let the notion sink into Ify and Grace.
Grace stares at her hands, then looks up at Ify. “The police attack.”
Ify nods grimly.
“When you arrived, did you see any memorials? Any tombs or gravemarkers?”
Ify shakes her head. “No.” Then she remembers how much it had unnerved her that she had seen no commemoration whatsoever of the war she had lived through. “No, there was . . .”
“There was nothing.” Ngozi uses one bootheel to itch the other calf. “Just some story about a Nine-Year Storm, I bet.”
“Yes,” Ify says, her voice drained of energy.
Quiet fills the back of the van. Then the grunt of a large animal whose pelt fills the window, blocking their view of the fireflies and the leaves swaying in the night wind. The van rocks back and forth, and Grace scrambles for purchase, but Ngozi only closes her eyes like she’s being lulled to sleep. Eventually, the large animal stops nudging the van and trudges onward. Ify looks at Grace and almost wants to chuckle at her assistant’s terror. But she also wants to tell her it’ll be okay. An almost overwhelming urge bubbles up in her to gently run her finger over Grace’s wound and murmur something soft and loving into her hair.
She turns to Ngozi and is ready to ask her question, except that when it finally comes to her lips, her throat closes up. Finally, she forces out, “How did you know her?”
Ngozi raises an eyebrow at Ify. “We served in the war, Onyii and I. You could call it her second tour.” A morose smile spreads across Ngozi’s lips. “A couple of the other sisters I served with knew Onyii from before. She’d lived in a camp that was attacked. Eventually, she made her way to us. That camp was where she raised you, wasn’t it?”
It all seems too much to Ify. After so long of having first denied Onyii, then searching for any trace of her in this country she bled for and finding nothing—after all of that, to be confronted with so stark a reminder of her sister, to be told of the life she lived without Ify . . . her heart doesn’t know what to do. “What was she like?” She has completely forgotten Grace.
Ngozi shrugs. “We didn’t really like each other at first. She thought she’d lost more than anyone else in the war.” Ngozi pauses to look at Ify and sees something that makes her face soften. “But we all loved. And the war took everything we loved away from us.”
“There was someone you loved?”
Ngozi leans back, smiles at the memory. “A sister. Her name was Kesandu. Sacrificed herself so that the rest of us could escape at the end of an operation.” She shifts, as though her mind is leaving the memory and returning to her body. “It was just before the ceasefire.”
Ify flinches and fears that Ngozi notices. “What happened . . . after the war?”
Ngozi shifts her jaw like she’s trying to stop tears. Then, for some reason, she glares at Grace before returning her gaze to Ify. “I tried to reconnect with my family. We tried to reintegrate, those of us who were left. Easier for some than for others. I was lucky. At least I had family left. But they were eager to move on. They thought they’d lost a daughter in the war. In some ways, they had. I couldn’t move on. Everyone wanted to. The government, employment agencies, human rights commissions, my parents. Then the government started phasing in forced cyberization. My parents happily submitted. They couldn’t wait to be a part of this new connected Nigeria.”
“But you resisted.” This from Grace, who has kept a posture of attention this whole time, like she’s ready for Ngozi to attack her again at any moment.
“At first, we could chat by way of app. But the government used those apps to track our locations.” Then a new deadness enters Ngozi’s voice. “The police came to my parents multiple times. We learned quickly that it was because they were communicating with a veteran of the war everyone was in such a rush to forget. Eventually, everyone cut me off. Friends, acquaintances, cousins. By the end, the police were harassing my family so much that I left. I disconnected from everything, forced them to delete me from their contacts. All of it. I even had to delete my recordings because of the metadata.” She turns her murderous look at Grace once again. “I haven’t heard my mother’s voice in almost five years.” Ngozi’s fingers curl around the barrel of her rifle. “All because of your Odoodo government.”